Tweet it and weep? Online, grief over dead celebrities is about us.

The more you grieve, the more special you are.

“I’m so sad that Robin Gibb passed away,” wrote one Twitter user, a student who would not have been born when the Bee Gees were at their peak. “I can’t focus on this lecture I want to go home and cry.”

(The inverse of BIRGing, incidentally, is “cutting off reflected failure” — or CORFing — which explains our need to criticize Charlie Sheen’s drug use or John Edwards’s infidelity. We want to make it clear that those indiscretions had nothing to do with us.)

Perhaps not coincidentally, Kos­loff’s other area of expertise is how people grapple with their own mortality. His research has found that people who have just been reminded of their inevitable demise feel more positively about celebrities.

Maybe the reverse is also true: When celebrities die, we become more aware of our ephemeral existence. Everyone dies, even a Bee Gee, and bleating out tweets is so much less about the musicians than it is about us. In one way or another, it always is.

Our natural fixation with celebrities has collided with the Internet-inspired desire to get there before everyone else. (Those hasty “R.I.P.” tweets seem as if they were written by the commenters who ecstatically proclaim themselves “FIRST” in online comment sections, absolving themselves of actually having anything interesting to say.)

These tendencies have collided with social networking’s inherent self-absorption — when used as directed, Facebook becomes a baby book for grown-ups, and users are encouraged to chart their milestones and feelings on a literal timeline. Social scientists go back and forth about whether Facebook makes us self-absorbed or un-self-conscious, insecure or overconfident. At the very least, one could argue that it makes us aware of the fact that undocumented lives are easily forgotten.

“Having something shared to talk about is an important way to build what sociologists call ‘social solidarity,’ ” writes Nathan Jurgenson, a social media theorist and graduate student at the University of Maryland. It’s what used to happen at the water cooler — where nobody cared that much about the weather, but everyone talked about it anyway because it performed a “social grooming function,” Jurgenson says. “It reminds us that we are together in this social group, not alone.”

Online, people don’t talk about the weather because it’s different for each far-flung friend. But we create an online funeral potluck for a dead Beastie Boy in which everyone brings a memory casserole to pass around the table. “We use the death, a shared culturally significant moment, to do this everyday social grooming,” Jurgenson says. “To have something to talk about together.”

But even a dead celebrity can only bind our ties for so long. Within 24 hours — 48, for the ultra-celebrities — social networks return to normal biorhythms. That, more than anything, is a commentary on the contrived nature of online mourning. Real grief can’t be confined to a 24-hour news cycle any more than it can be confined to 140 characters. This Internet grief comes, conquers and quickly leaves.

But before tweets and posts peter out, they occasionally reach levels of arch self-awareness. Observe this tweet by Babe Walker, whose “White Girl Problems” Twitter account often captures the zeitgeist, then frog-marches the zeitgeist to its most ridiculous extreme. On the occasion of Summer’s passing, Walker tweeted:

“In a way, Donna Summer was my mom.”